This post is meant as a response to DevilBoy and in part you, Chasing.

Blending both concepts of copyright violation and theft together, what happens in this common situation?

  1. I go to a store and buy an audio CD. I'm given the receipt.
  2. My audio CD is stolen at some later date. I still have the receipt.

We know a theft happens. Someone stole the disc. However, where is my unique copy created by the rights holder? Is it on the CD? The receipt? Or perhaps more intangible as some sort of judgement (think more like metadata)?

Is the thief guilty of copyright infringement?

Edit: as meeting this line of thought out, I realize there are 2nd hand shops that can legally sell media of all types (cd's included). How this works is the person (me) goes in with the intent to sell the disc. They give me a price, which we come to a meeting of the minds. Sale occurs based upon first-sale doctrine.

This would indicate that the proof of copyright does not exist in the receipt. So would the rightful copy retain with me if there is no meeting of the minds (theft)?

Piracy for personal use is a 'victimless' (don't bite my head off please) crime, that's why it's OK here. Stealing is not.

Piracy is different from stealing, yeah. But I find it kind of short-sighted this notion that it's "victimless."

Not intending to bite your head off. :-)

A very simple thought experiment:

A rap artist is hired by a label to create an album. Said artist later dies. The label goes bankrupt soon thereafter, or perhaps simply folds up shop and leaves the business without auctioning off its assets.

I have produced a copy of the album, which I host at my own cost from my server, once these events have transpired. There is no reasonable "victim" left for this crime of infringement, and indeed I'm helping to reduce the scarcity of this product in the world.

While somewhat contrived, this thought experiment is not particularly far off from reality.

No, it's pretty far off from reality. It's an extreme edge case that doesn't at all justify pirating Photoshop.

Ah, you're correct--we were talking about software mainly, not music.

Software companies never go out of business without selling off their assets, and it's the extreme edge-case where people continue to distribute the works.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware

This truly seldom happens.

Again, abandonware does not justify pirating Photoshop, a product that is constantly updated by a very active company.

See also abandonware or emulation of older systems. It's technically illegal for me to go download a copy of System Shock, but the company that made it is long gone, and the company that bought their assets isn't doing anything with it.

Illegal? Sort of. Immoral? Not really.

> There is no reasonable "victim" left for this crime of infringement

The victim is the artist's heirs.

What'd they do to deserve anything?

Hey, it takes a lot of effort and sweat-of-the-brow to be born as the kid of some rich dude!

I've been trying for years and I still haven't managed it!

Regardless of you thinking the view is short-sighted, without a counterargument it will remain victimless.

Not necessarily. When you pirate something, you are hurting the owner's chances of selling it to you in the future. If you know that there is no chance that you will buy it, then it is victimless. If however things change and you are in a position where you would buy it, you are far less likely to, which does hurt the seller.

In some cases you're actually helping the owner's chances of selling it to you in the future. Sometimes I pirate something and it's so good that I just have to buy it.

Of course, in a lot of cases demos would work well for that, but they seem to have fallen out of favour recently.